Senate Republicans are expected on Tuesday to reject an international treaty affirming the rights of people with disabilities.

Democrats made a last-ditch effort to secure the two-thirds vote for ratification of the United Nations convention, but appeared to be well short of that mark ahead of Tuesday’s scheduled vote.

Conservative activists have come out in force against the treaty, warning it would pave the way for government interference in homeschooling. Supporters of the pact say it would merely extend the rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act to all nations.

“This is about Americans and raising the standard of how we treat Americans around the world,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Democrats would need only 66 senators to ratify the treaty, due to the absence of Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), but Republican votes have been hard to come by.

Thirty-six Republican senators signed a letter to Senate leaders in September promising to oppose any treaty brought to a vote during the lame-duck session of Congress.

Democrats had hoped some of those senators would have a change of heart after the election, and were able to peel off two GOP votes last week when Sens. Orrin Hatch (Utah) and Scott Brown (Mass.) voted to proceed to the disabilities treaty on the Senate floor.

The 61-36 vote to proceed would not have been enough for ratification, however, and three Republicans who abstained from the September letter — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sens. James Inhofe (Okla.) and Jerry Moran (Kan.) — voted no, further dimming Democratic hopes.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who spearheaded the September letter, is working alongside former presidential candidate Rick Santorum, the Heritage Foundation and the Home School Legal Defense Association to ensure the treaty’s defeat. They warn it would create a U.N. committee that could impinge on U.S. sovereignty.

“Our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities,” Lee said last week. “They have everything to do with protecting U.S. sovereignty, protecting the interests of parents in the United States and the interests of families.”

Opponents of the treaty have also criticized it for not excluding abortion rights.

Democrats say the treaty stays neutral on abortion by calling on governments to offer people with disabilities the full range of family-planning services provided under domestic law.

Conservative groups pressed for the addition of language that would specify that the treaty does not create any new abortion rights, arguing that abortion is often a form of discrimination against people with disabilities.

All nine Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted for language excluding abortion rights when the treaty came before the panel in July. The amendment failed, and only three Republicans — Sens. Dick Lugar (Ind.), John Barrasso (Wyo.) and Johnny Isakson (Ga.) — joined the 10 Democrats on the panel voting for passage.

Democrats were trying Monday to convince on-the-fence Republicans that a “no” vote on the Senate floor would be politically painful.

The treaty has the support of a handful of Republican senators — including former presidential candidate John McCain (Ariz.) and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Barrasso — as well as many advocates for people with disabilities and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) is expected to champion the treaty in a return to the Senate floor Tuesday after denouncing the “scare tactics” used by its opponents in a letter distributed Monday.

Democrats have also roped in former Attorney General and Pennsylvania Gov. Richard Thornburgh, who was President George H. W. Bush’s point man on the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990.

The treaty, Thornburgh said Monday, would cede “no authority to the U.N. over the U.S. or any of its citizens. None. Zero.” He said the U.N. committee’s recommendations would be purely advisory and could not require the United States to change its laws or pass new ones and would not create any legal rights in state or federal courts.

The treaty was negotiated under President George W. Bush and was signed by President Obama in July 2009. It has been signed by at least 153 countries in addition to the United States.

Lee in his letter said the lame-duck session would not be an “appropriate” time for passage of treaties that will become the “supreme law of the land.”

Kerry countered by saying the Senate has passed treaties 19 times during lame-duck sessions. He said the sitting senators, who “did all the work” sitting in on the committee’s markup of the treaty this summer, should be the ones to vote on it.

President Obama, in a statement marking the International Day of Persons with Disabilities on Monday, said U.S. leadership on a key human-rights issue is at stake.

“Ratifying the convention in the Senate would reaffirm America’s position as the global leader on disability rights,” Obama said, “and better position us to encourage progress toward inclusion, equal opportunity, full participation, independent living and economic self-sufficiency for persons with disabilities worldwide.”

“Ratifying the convention in the Senate would reaffirm America’s position as the global leader on disability rights,” Obama said, “and better position us to encourage progress toward inclusion, equal opportunity, full participation, independent living and economic self-sufficiency for persons with disabilities worldwide.”

1) We need the UN to do that?
2) How does this happen when the US is not even part of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities?

so you want to block something good and that doesn't cost the U.S. anything just on the principle of general U.N. hatred?

listen to yourself

insane

what don't you contact the Disable American Veterans and tell them how wrong they are for supporting ratification.

Disabled American Veterans across the globe wouldn't be helps by ramps etc in foreign countries. Or maybe call Senator Bob Dole and tell him to go get ****ed.

No, I don't have any hatred for the UN at all. And it has nothing to do with being "Against" any disabled people.

It has everything to do with the US demanding that other countries follow US protocol. Whatever that protocol might be. If this were an anti-smoking ratification, I'd still feel the same way. I don't think we need UN policy to force other countries to be more like the US. It's as simple as that. This ratification does nothing for the US. We already have these things in place. All it does is make other countries play by US rules, which generally causes those other countries to hate us. We are not the policy makers for the world.

No, I don't have any hatred for the UN at all. And it has nothing to do with being "Against" any disabled people.

It has everything to do with the US demanding that other countries follow US protocol. Whatever that protocol might be. If this were an anti-smoking ratification, I'd still feel the same way. I don't think we need UN policy to force other countries to be more like the US. It's as simple as that. This ratification does nothing for the US. We already have these things in place. All it does is make other countries play by US rules, which generally causes those other countries to hate us. We are not the policy makers for the world.

Good post. I agree.

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The party further narrowed its ever-narrowing base on Tuesday when 38 senators voted to reject the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. Former Sen. Bob Dole, who lost the use of his right arm in World War II, appeared on the Senate floor in a wheelchair, to shame his fellow Republicans into voting “aye.” It was like the scene from The Godfather Part II, when Frankie Pentangeli’s brother appears in a Senate committee room to shame Frankie from breaking the code of omerta and testifying against Michael Corleone.

In this case, though, it didn’t work. The Senate Republicans were shameless. They didn’t listen to Dole or to President George H.W. Bush, another World War II veteran who signed the Americans With Disabilities Act, on which the U.N. Convention was based. Instead, they listened to former Sen. Rick Santorum, who traveled to Washington to warn that the Convention could interfere with the right of parents to home school disabled children. Santorum, whose daughter is disabled, said the treaty would be a “direct assault on us and our family” because it would allow the government to separate disabled children from their parents. But as Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post:

The treaty requires virtually nothing of the United States. It essentially directs the other signatories to update their laws so that they more closely match the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even Lee thought it necessary to preface his opposition with the qualifier that “our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities.”

Their concerns, rather, came from the dark world of U.N. conspiracy theories. The opponents argue that the treaty, like most everything the United Nations does, undermines American sovereignty — in this case via a plot to keep Americans from home-schooling their children and making other decisions about their well-being.

So Tea Party paranoia triumphed over reaching out to a marginalized group. That dynamic pretty much defines the contemporary Republican Party.

Dick Durbin voted yes on the Convention. Mark Kirk -- the senator who would have benefited most from ratification -- was the only senator who did not vote. He’s still recovering from the stroke he suffered in January.

No, I don't have any hatred for the UN at all. And it has nothing to do with being "Against" any disabled people.

It has everything to do with the US demanding that other countries follow US protocol. Whatever that protocol might be. If this were an anti-smoking ratification, I'd still feel the same way. I don't think we need UN policy to force other countries to be more like the US. It's as simple as that. This ratification does nothing for the US. We already have these things in place. All it does is make other countries play by US rules, which generally causes those other countries to hate us. We are not the policy makers for the world.

The treaty has zero power to force countries to do anything ... Zero.

this is an agreement and guideline that encourage participation.

pathetic excuses ... looking for a reason to block everything they can